War for the Oaks (18 page)

"The infernal contraption was your idea."

"It's given me a headache," he grumbled.

"Your headache came out of a bottle of Mr. Boston Five-Star. It has nothing to do with motorcycles."

The phouka looked sullen.

Eddi gazed wearily up at the iron stairs to the third floor practice space. She had slept a little, but only enough to make her feel worse. She felt, in fact, as if every cell in her body was poisonous to every other cell. It was no condition to be in for the band's first practice.

And she didn't want to face Carla. Carla might read her expression and remember what day it was. Carla would want to protect her, to become embroiled in the whole bizarre business. Eddi wasn't going to let that happen.

Unless Carla pried it out of her. Which she could do.

"Of course you want to practice," the phouka said sourly. "This may be your last chance."

Eddi felt her insides scramble. "I thought you said you'd protect me."

"No one," he glowered at her, "is perfect." He pressed his lips together for an instant, then grinned. "Except, of course, myself."

Eddi watched his face as she said, "Then I
will
be safe tonight?"

"Well," he said slowly, "not entirely."

She realized that she should put the kickstand down now, before her strength drained away completely and she let the bike fall on her. Killed? She put the stand down, and sat staring at the bland face of the speedometer.

Tonight? She couldn't quite believe in dying—though if she didn't, why did her arms and legs seem suddenly to be made of gelatin, and her mouth seem full of glue?

The phouka must have seen her distress. "Oak and Ash. Don't mind me, dear heart. It's the hangover speaking."

"But it's true, isn't it?"

He sighed. "We could
all
be killed. That is, unfortunately, one of the points of tonight's exercise. But anyone with designs on your life will be trying to go through me, and that only after going through a host of folk who fight like cornered badgers."

"It sounds like I'm going to be more trouble than I'm worth."

"You, my primrose, are all that raises this beyond the level of an ordinary territorial squabble. You and the sheer scale of the thing, that is."

"There's a difference between a territorial squabble and a war?" Eddi asked, hoping for an intelligible answer.

The phouka rubbed his temples. "A true war is one in which the blood of immortals is shed. Anything less has all the significance of a hard-fought game of football, to the Folk."

"It sounds just like humanity to me," Eddi broke in impatiently. "We'll even bleed for football, sometimes."

"As I have said, no sense of history. There's magic in spilled blood, my child. Your ancestors knew this, and on occasion even put it to the intended use." The phouka was beginning to warm to his lecturing. "And in immortal blood, which is rather more difficult to spill, there is enormous power. In a war of the Folk, the drawing of blood, the taking of lives, forces the participants to abide by the outcome of the fight. Without that, we can fight on for years over the same issue, the same piece of ground—like mortals. But immortal blood tends to stay in immortal veins, and stern measures are needed to have it otherwise."

He talked about spilling blood so calmly, as if it was something that happened elsewhere to others. And maybe it was, for him. He was immortal. There was nothing abstract about the subject for Eddi. She could feel panic bubbling up inside her like yeast.

"And one of the most effective measures," the phouka continued, "is to have a mortal on the battlefield, one with certain qualities, who is bound to the fight."

"Bound?"

The phouka closed his eyes and covered his face with one hand. "May the earth open and swallow me," he muttered. "Immediately."

Eddi stared at him, alarmed. "What aren't you telling me?"

He glared. "As far as I can tell, precious little, whether I will or no!"

"Just what's involved in being 'bound to the fight'?"

"Bread and blood," he snapped, "and much good may the knowledge do you."

Eddi slid off the bike and jammed the key in her pocket. "Well, it
would
do me good. If you'd just tell me what's going on, I might be more cooperative, dammit."

"And you might not. I've told you a great deal more than I should have in the past weeks. I've flown in the face of tradition, inclination, and direct orders. You'll cozen nothing more out of me."

"I'll . . . what?"

"Cozen," the phouka said bitterly. "Trick. Beguile."

"I've never tried to trick you!"

"Hah."

She looked at him through narrowed eyes. "What if I won't go through with it?"

"With what?"

"This . . . binding. If it was no big deal, you'd have told me about it."

The phouka gave an exasperated hiss. "By earth and air, I've tried to keep you in the dark at every step of the way! Why balk at it now?"

She'd never made him so angry—she wouldn't have believed she could. What had happened to the perfect bastard who'd taken control of her life on the Nicollet Mall? That phouka would have laughed at her, ordered her around. He wouldn't have thought it worth the trouble to fight with her.

She said, "If I got on the bike right now, and tried to ride away—would you stop me?"

He seemed angrier still, and about to speak. Then he turned away, looking back toward downtown and, she suspected, not seeing it. A
knot of muscle had leaped into sudden relief in his jaw. He lifted one hand to the side of his face, as if to nurse his headache, and Eddi lost sight of his expression.

At last he said fiercely, "No."

A damp breeze, smelling of mud and car exhaust, fluttered his hair and hers. "You'd get in trouble for that, wouldn't you?" Eddi said.

"Trouble." He spat out some crisp word that Eddi didn't catch, and might not have recognized anyway. "Yes, I suppose 'trouble' would cover it, if spread thin." He swept his hair back from his face with both hands, a movement that seemed equivalent to rolling up his sleeves. It made his eyes slant even more than usual.

"Eddi," he said earnestly, "I haven't much taste for begging, and less skill. But I will happily beg you for this, with all the meager talent at my command. I would even
bribe
you, had I anything to offer. Will you please,
please
, go through with the business tonight?"

"You make it sound as if I have a choice."

He closed his eyes, shut out her angry stare. "You do."

Then he'd meant what he'd said; if she left now, he wouldn't stop her. It made her hands shake. She stuffed them in her jacket pockets.

"You told me once that I
couldn't
get away, that the Unseelie Court would come after me."

"And they would. But they may be less vigilant now, thinking that if you meant to flee, you'd have done it weeks ago. You know more of your enemy now as well—though that may be scant help." He paused, and when he spoke again, it might have been to himself. "And there is more of you to reckon with than I suspected then."

Playacting!
Eddi thought.
Isn't it?
"What's involved in this binding?"

The phouka sighed. "If I could tell you and not make it sound worse than it is, I would."

Eddi started across the parking lot to the stairs.

"But I can do this much," he said at last, as if the words were dragged up his throat with a string. "I can enable you to see it all truly, so that what you do, you do by your will and not at the prompting of any glamour."

Eddi looked at him over her shoulder. How well he was coming to know what mattered to her . . . .

"But in return, you must promise to do what is set before you to
do—and you must tell no one that I've tampered with the process. Or I will indeed," he grinned ruefully, "be in trouble."

"Sounds like it amounts to the same thing."

"Perhaps to you. Not to me."

"Why, after all this, would you offer to let me go now?" she blurted out. "Is this some last disgusting trick?"

The expression that swept the phouka's face was a little frightening, though Eddi couldn't say what it meant. He turned sharply away.

From behind and above them came the sound of a heavy door opening, and they looked up. Carla was standing in the doorway at the top of the iron stairs.

"Come on, guys!" she yelled. "You're late!"

The phouka let his breath out audibly. "Well! Had I a pot of gold to bestow . . . ," he said. "After you, my sweet."

Eddi shook her head and rattled up the stairs.

Someone had managed to open a couple of the dusty painted-shut window sections in the rehearsal space. The hanging sheets moved in the breeze, and the room smelled of electrical power and spring.

" 'Bout time," Carla said when Eddi came in the door. She nodded toward the middle of the room and added, "Much longer, and they would have wandered off into the Twilight Zone and never been seen again."

Dan, Willy, and Hedge were engaged in playing something that might once have been Dire Straits' "Tunnel of Love." It was not loud, but it was . . . well, weird. Dan was adding and subtracting synthesizer voices and dabbing in sampled sounds wherever a blank spot seemed imminent. Hedge was running the bass through a phase shifter. The bone-resonant notes wove in and out, forward and back, like the breathing of a monstrous asthmatic cat. Willy's guitar was so unmodified as to sound naked; it would follow the other two docilely through the chords for a few measures, then, in something like musical senility, it would wander off into the lead riff for another song entirely. They were all three absorbed in each other, glancing back and forth for cues. Willy's hair had already fallen into his eyes.

Eddi found herself grinning at them in proprietary pride. "So what are you doing standing here?" she said to Carla.

Carla blinked.

"Let's jam, kid."

And for a while, they did. Carla added a bass drum beat to anchor it all, then found a pattern on the toms that interlocked with Hedge's phasing. Eddi played sparse guitar, high and stringy.

A chord progression opened like a door before her. It led toward a song she and Dan and Carla had worked on a week ago. She leaned on the rhythm, bending it to the shape she wanted. Carla noticed and followed her; Dan picked it up, then started his left-hand riff. Hedge and Willy heard the new drive and unity behind the sound, and added themselves to it.

Eddi went to the mike and heard Dan back off his improvising, just a little; Willy came back to the chords and stayed there.

Neon on the frontage road
The red light shines on me
I only want you to be happy
I only want me to be free

Midnight on the interstate
I'm on the run from you
I've got a dollar says you're lying
I've got a feeling says it's true
.

She gave Willy the nod for a lead break, and he snagged the melody and carried it away, ran with it as if it were a kite in the wind. Then she pointed to Hedge, Willy, and Dan, and drew a finger across her throat. Everything stopped but drums.

You look so sweet when you 're asleep,
When your mouth is closed;
The angry things all shut inside,
The kind of things you used to hide from me.
And far away from you, I keep
Pictures of you, posed,
All your good side, all well-groomed,
Chronicles of true love doomed
By what I didn 't see
.

Synthesizer, guitar, and bass swelled slowly through the second half of the bridge in answer to her prompting. She heard Carla and Willy
add wordless harmonies, too, and that filled her with reckless delight. The last verse was a ragged but enthusiastic climax.

Water on the motorway
The wipers beat like hearts
Why do you love me best whenever
We're a hundred slippery miles apart?

After that, there was the rattle of critical comment that she'd already come to expect. "I think you want bass on that bridge." Carla said.

Dan said, frowning absently, "Can we try that again? I wanna bend that last note out of shape, like a car goin' by—is that too hokey?"

"We'd
better
do it again," Willy laughed. "We don't know how to start it yet."

Hedge puckered up his face, studied his axe for a moment, and played a couple measures that made a very good intro.

By the time Eddi called a rest, they'd improved the chord progressions and added drum punches to the lead break. Dan had put a rush of white noise into the second verse that suggested tires on wet pavement. Willy and Carla were singing the words on the bridge. They sounded remarkably like a band.

Eddi flopped down on the wooden floor. "We need a couch. And a PA. And a
coffeemaker!
"

"I'll go for coffee," Carla offered. "I need cigs anyway."

Eddi snapped upright and leveled an admonishing finger. "You slack off on the smoking, girl. Bad for your voice."

Carla stuck out her tongue and turned to Dan. "Danny? Wanna come with?"

"Yeah, sure." Dan swept a look over his equipment, like a parent wondering if the kids really were safe by themselves. Carla grabbed her jacket, and they trotted out the door.

"She thinks I'm kidding," Eddi said to the ceiling. "Boy, is she gonna be surprised."

It seemed awfully quiet. She didn't want quiet; it was suitable for thinking in, and right now Eddi had no use for thinking. The music had worked like a drug, wiping away her quarrel with the phouka, her fear of what the evening would bring. Now the drug was wearing off. Conversation was not the all-absorbing distraction that music was, but she would settle for it.

She propped herself up on one elbow and looked around for Willy. She found him leaning against the wall at the far end of the room talking to the phouka.
Oh, God
, she thought,
what mischief is that little jerk up to now?
But there was no spark of wickedness about the phouka. He was sitting on the floor with his chin on his knees, looking as close to gloomy as she could imagine him.

Willy, in contrast, seemed to glow. He was discussing something with great seriousness, and he leaned forward as he spoke, punctuating everything he said with crisp motions of his pale hands. He was full of contained energy, and Eddi found herself envying him for it, and disliking the phouka for not reacting to it, and despising herself for both feelings. She dropped back to the floor, tucked her hands under her head, and closed her eyes.